Read this excellent article from the New York Times on the reality of giving birth, motherhood and the state of medical facilities in Africa, particularly Tanzania.  If you’re living in the West, this will give you a new perspective on life in the village here.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/health/24birth.html?ref=global-home

A few weeks back we took a road trip to southwestern Tanzania to visit Kitulo National Park, the newest park in Tanzania.  Kitulo lies on a high plateau at nearly 10,000 feet altitude (3000 m) with rolling grass and flower plains on one side and a thick primeval forest on the other.  We parked on the side of the road and walked to the edge of the plateau to look down into the forest below.  Andrea exclaimed “Look at that rainbow, it’s a circle!”  We waved our arms above our heads and giant figures below also waved their arms, right in the middle of the rainbow.  “That’s us!” I said and realized that I was finally looking at the rare Brocken Spectre!

The Brocken Spectre surrounds us while looking down into the mountains on the south side of Kitulo National Park in Tanzania.

Also called a mountain spectre or the Brocken bow, the Brocken Spectre is the highly magnified shadow of the observer, projected onto the clouds opposite the sun.  Named Brocken after a peak in the Harz Mountains of Germany, the Spectre was first named by Johann Silberschlag in 1780 on Brocken Peak where the phenomena regularly occurs.

You too can find a Brocken Spectre, but it takes certain specific conditions.  First, they only occur when the sun shines from behind you while you are looking down from a high point into the mist or clouds below.  The sunlight projects your shadow forward and magnifies it.  Or so it seems.  Apparently the huge size of your shadow is just an illustion caused by a twist of gaps in the clouds, murky depth perception and the size of the water droplets in the clouds.  Even so, it’s a cool illusion because your shadow looks like a giant monster figure in the clouds.

The rest of Kitulo National Park was not impressive.  It suffers from really unrealistic policies promoted by the government here.  For example, we wanted to do a hike in the park.  But park regulations say we have to pay $30 each to just step out of the car.  Oh, and we also had to hire a “walking guide” for more money.  As it was, we hired a guard who showed up with his machine gun and even though he had worked in the park for 5 years, he didn’t know the name of a single bird or flower.  Situations like this are very frustrating because as foreigners we pay a lot of money to enter the parks, 40 times the local price, and we expect something for the money.  Apparently, that isn’t always the case.  At least the Brocken Spectre saved the day!

Check out this story in National Geographic Adventure - a man located the grave site of missing adventurer Everett Ruess.  Missing since 1934!  It was long a mystery among people interested in the American southwest.  This may be the answer:

http://adventure.nationalgeographic.com/2009/04/everett-ruess/david-roberts-text

Jutting from the flat plains of central Tanzania, the Eastern Arc Mountains remain a haven of biodiversity in an otherwise challenged landscape.  The peaks cover less than 2% of Tanzania’s land area, but contain 30-40% of the country’s plant and animal species, including 12 species of primates, 2500 plant species, more than 250 types of butterflies and over 250 different birds.  It’s a mind boggling amount of diversity stemming from the mountain range’s incredible altitude range (250m to 2576m) and from the fact that the environment of these mountains may have stayed constant for the last 30 million years.

Last weekend we headed to  the Udzungwa Mountains National Park, the crown jewel of the Eastern Arc Mountains and one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots.

To get to the Udzungwa Mountains from our house in Morogoro, we drove 3 hours southwest, past the Uluguru Mountains, through Mikumi National Park and turned south on a road that quickly deteriorated into a rough dirt track.  Once we turned south, I could see the borders of the park clearly.  Outside the park, the mountains had been clear cut and burned for marginal farmland.  Inside the park boundaries, the virgin forest soared toward the sky, a beautiful mix of huge ancient trees.

At the park office, we asked about hikes and they gave us the usual runaround, meaning they wanted to just take us on the shortest hike.  I say “take us” because the park service here in Tanzania makes all visitors hire a guide as well.  In our case, they made us hire a guide and a park ranger, “Just in case you see big animals and they attack” they said.

Early the next morning we met our guide, Grant, an intelligent young man who has been guiding in the park for 5 years and our ranger, a lanky youth with a submachine gun.  “Do we get to shoot the gun?” I asked, but no one laughed.

As soon as we got into the park, Andrea tripped over some volleyball size elephant poop.  “See!  That is why you need the ranger!” exclaimed our guide, feeling like he’d proven his point that a machine-gun toting youth was indeed, needed.  As we climbed the thin trail up into the forest, I wondered what we’d really do if we met a big elephant on the trail.  I mean, where were we going to go?  Run into the forest?  The ranger would try to shoot it?  Anyway, since the ranger was busy talking loudly into his cell phone, I didn’t think there must be much danger of surprising an elephant. We never saw an elephant, but we did see lots of tracks.

If you’re wondering how big an elephant track is, you can put 4 size ten (size 43 Euro) feet into it and have a bit of room to spare.  Besides not seeing the elephant, we also didn’t see many other animals at all in that, one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots.  We spotted a few nice butterflies, heard a few birds and a spitting cobra slithered through the leaves about three feet behind me.

Out of the 12 primate species, we saw just 4 – the yellow baboon, black and white colobus, Syke’s Monkey and the rare Iringa Red Colobus, which is found nowhere else in the world.  That was pretty cool, but I have to admit that we expected more.

The trail we hiked was called Campsite 3 Trail.  Not very creative, I know.  It climbed about 5 miles straight up the mountain, traversed behind a small peak and then dropped 5 miles straight down again.  It took us 8 hours of constant walking with just a half hour break for lunch.  We were all pretty crushed by the end, except for the ranger who was still talking on his phone.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about the park were the incredible trees.  Some of the trees looked absolutely incredible – rising hundreds of feet through the forest.  It’s really a botanist’s dream park.

A

fter our hike, we hydrated back at camp with a few beers and some local organic brandy.  The stars came out with the Southern Cross to the south and the Big Dipper to the north.  It was another excellent adventure in Tanzania

Two weeks ago our gardener looked down and I asked him what was wrong.  “I have typhoid” he calmly replied.  The guard at the house next door kept coughing and I asked him what was wrong.  “I have malaria” he said “Oh, and so does everyone else in the house.”  7% of the town we live in has AIDs.  There is a massive meningitis outbreak in West Africa that has already killed 1900 Africans, with another 56,000 reported cases.

And now Mexican Swine Flu.

Who is going to win?  The little bugs or the big humans?  Stay tuned!

Read about the meningitis here:

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/04/29/africa.meningitis/index.html?iref=mpstoryview